Four Fearless Forecasts for the New Year

As
we near the end of the decade, we're looking back at another eventful year in
the evolution of the Internet and public cloud, with some notable (and
controversial) developments.

On
the Internet, 2019 gave us the "Summer of Outages" - one of the most
active period of major outages in recent history, as Google Cloud,
Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (twice), Google Calendar, Cloudflare,
Reddit and Apple iCloud all experienced significant downtime - all in a six
week period during June and July.

2019
also saw the continued political fracturing of the Internet, most notably in
Russia, which passed a Sovereign Internet law that effectively attempts
to disconnect the Internet from the rest of the world. These efforts, echoing
Iran's successful disconnect in November represents the extreme spectrum of
governmental control over flows of traffic and access to web-based services.

So
where do we go from here? ThousandEyes peers into our crystal ball for our
Fearless Forecast of what's ahead in the coming year:

The ‘Splinternet' becomes more splintered

In 2019, Russia passed its ‘Sovereign Internet' law to block off
its Internet from the rest of the world, and Iran implemented a near-total
Internet shutdown. In 2020, this "Splinternet" trend of a fragmented Internet
will accelerate, as more countries will attempt to create restrictions of their
Internet using government control over flows of traffic and internet-based
services. The most likely candidates to extend these restrictions? Turkey,
Turkmenistan, and Saudi Arabia.

Backbone networks increase dramatically

As the amount of Internet traffic grows by the
minute with every TikTok video, business traffic is competing against cat
videos on a network that it wasn't designed for. Just as the ThousandEyes Cloud
Performance Benchmark report found Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure preferring
to use their own private backbone networks (with AWS and IBM also offering this
option), we'll see more SaaS companies and cloud-based service providers
creating private backbone networks to optimize their own network traffic
instead of relying on the unpredictable public Internet.

A Chinese ISP causes major global collateral
damage

The Great Firewall doesn't just isolate Internet
users in China, as many people believe. Government censorship is implemented by
Chinese ISPs far beyond the borders of mainland China. Given how even an
innocent routing error can send traffic directly into this censorship path,
we're likely to see an incident of major collateral damage in the coming year.
A major ISP will knock hundreds of sites and services around the world offline
for a meaningful period of time as a result of firewall policies meant only to
impact users within China.

DNS Snafus will be responsible for the most outages in 2020

Many things can lead to future outages, including natural
disasters, attacks or even simple human errors. Foundational Internet systems,
BGP and DNS, can also fall prey to error and exploitation that leads to major
outages, particularly given that they were built to suit an earlier, more
innocent time in the history of the Internet. BGP-related
outages caused major collateral damage in 2019, leading many ISPs to adopt
better Internet routing hygiene measures, which will dramatically decline these
issues in 2020. Similarly, DDoS attacks will decline overall, particularly in
the US and Europe.

DNS, as an often overlooked
service, may be ripe for a major disruption or
compromise that could cause ripple effects across the wider Internet. Past
DNS attacks such as Dyn have had a huge blast radius, causing widespread
outages and creating a devastating impact on businesses - so enterprises should
prepare (or brace) themselves for the inevitability of a DNS breakage.

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About the Author

Angelique has spent years in technical marketing roles related to network infrastructure and network visibility. When not writing, she enjoys lifting heavy barbells and jumping on boxes.